Sunday, March 14, 2010

NRK spoke with many Jewish parents who tell of Jew hatred against their children. Nobody dared speak with their name and image and they were therefore anonymized.

A Jewish father says that his son was on his way home from school when he was stopped by a gang of older boys:

"They asked: 'aren't you a Jew?', to which he answered yes. Then he was physically taken and hung in the woods because he was a Jew. He managed to get himself lose, how he doesn't know today and ran home," says the father.

Harassment from Muslim boys has become so bad that the family fled the district to another place. But the children weren't let alone there either.

NRK spoke with the teachers in high schools with many Muslim students. None of the teachers dared to be interviewed. They are afraid of reprisals from the students and were therefore anonymized.

Teacher 1, female:

"There's a notorious bullying of Jews. Everything from jokes to public death threats. "It says in the Koran that you should kill Jews, all proper Muslims hate Jews. Jews will be killed if they come here to this school," the students say. To praise Hitler for what he did to the Jews also get repeated by students at my school. The worst of this is that Jew-hatred has become completley legitimate among large groups of students of Muslim background."

Teacher 2, male:

"I see Jew-hatred particularly in social-studies class. Students say the Jews control everything, the entire West is controlled by Jews. Some say also that they admire Hitler because he killed Jews. 'The attack on the Twin Towers in New York September 11, 2001, it was the Jews who were behind it'. In my class things are such that if somebody says they support terrorism, there's some who protest. But if somebody expresses Jew-hatred, nobody protests."

Teacher 3, female:

"Several students snicker when I speak of the Holocaust. A boy stood up and ordered me to stop speaking of Jews and the Holocaust. Most of these youth are born and raised in Norway. I think it's shocking that it's possible to grow up in Norway with such attitudes."

Teacher 4, male:

"F*cking Jew' is a much used curse in class. If I were Jewish I would have felt extremely insulted. These statements are a big problem."

The teachers NRK spoke with had the impression that students in Norwegian school get many of their attitudes from radio and TV broadcasts via satellite.